Try opening a new catalog more often and starting fresh. Works for me. I love LR.

Is this a joke? I indeed did this once (saving metadata/keywords to files, new catalog, read stuff back), but all your collections are gone. For a program with a professional attitude, this hardly can be the solution... and creating a new catalog shouldn't be doing anything different from optimizing it in the first place.

It's slower than 3.6 which from memory was slower than the V2. I now have the shipping version of 4.1 which is a little brisker than 4.1RC. After trawling through the 800 post thread on the Lightroom page of the Adobe forum, I picked up a couple of items that have been useful.

The first and most important is that LR4 works quicker with DNG. So be sure to import as DNG and be absolutely sure to check the "Embed Fast Load Data" check box in Preferences. This adds an insignificant 80-100Kb to your filesize. Why do you suppose Adobe has added the "Embed Fast Load Data" option? It's pretty clear they've struggled with performance benchmarks, and kicked in with "Embed Fast Load Data" as a workaround. Also, go to File, and check Optimize Catalog.

The earlier non-public betas were absolutely glacial in the way they rendered files, responded to adjustments etc. But the software engineers knew the new tools were worth persisting with, and they're right! But those same engineers still have a lot of work to do to sharpen performance.

Filesize. I notice a speed difference between my smaller 1D4 files and the bigger 5D3 files. Spare a thought for photographers who dropped their $$ on a Nikon D800 and choose to process through Lightroom. Yar!

jsylar

I have both LR 3.6 and 4.1 installed in the same computer and I don't notice any performance degradation at all between 3.6 and 4.1.

The size of catalog of LR 3.6 is 673.13 MB and that of LR 4.1 is 907.3 MB. I have tens of thousand photos stored. A lot of times along with LR I have PS CS 5 running in the background. All fine performance wise.

Core i5 2.7 GHz, 8 GB RAM running Mac OS X. For storage, I have 1 TB 7200 rpm disk for system, applications and catalog (the catalog on its own partition), and 2 TB Western Digital Green exclusively for photos.

4.1 RC2 has been the business for me... The speed difference between it and LR 3.6 (but I think there was a problem with 3.6 on my comp) is just incredible. I haven't updated out of it yet, because it goes alright.

4.1 RC2 has been the business for me... The speed difference between it and LR 3.6 (but I think there was a problem with 3.6 on my comp) is just incredible. I haven't updated out of it yet, because it goes alright.

Suggest you move to the final 4.1. Amazing speed up of sliders response and rendering after adjustment brushes.

Suggest you move to the final 4.1. Amazing speed up of sliders response and rendering after adjustment brushes.

It's true that bashing a product based on betas and release candidates is not appropriate. However, even if LR4.1 does show some improvement, the inexplicable slowdowns forcing a restart still happen - to catch up with LR3 stability, I guess we'll have until LR4.3.

Suggest you move to the final 4.1. Amazing speed up of sliders response and rendering after adjustment brushes.

It's true that bashing a product based on betas and release candidates is not appropriate. However, even if LR4.1 does show some improvement, the inexplicable slowdowns forcing a restart still happen - to catch up with LR3 stability, I guess we'll have until LR4.3.

I saw a dramatic improvement. I don't have the fastest system, but I have tried to tune it to LR needs...i.e. fast processor, Win7-64, >8GB memory, SSD for OS, RAW cache, and LR Cat.

With 4.1RC2, I only had...significant...problems when doing lots of adj. brush work....which did cause, at times, the need to restart as processing time and memory usage increase...a lot.

LR 4.1 final has clear all this up. I know only see minor delays with LOTS of adj. brush work....no problems with NR on, second monitor active, nor, really, anything else. Have never needed a restart.

You seem to be aware of the current things to do with 4.1 to reduce processing issues. If you are having the problems you say, I suspect other issues in your system. What config and setup do you have?

I purchased a new I7 quad core, 3.6GHZ, and loaded 32 GB Crucial Ram. I have 3 HD's, first is a 560 GB SSD to run programs, 2nd 1TB to hold all cache and catalogs, 3rd 2TB to finalize my photos and storage. Even with this set-up and when running LR 4.1 it still lags A LOT......... I think no matter how fast your PC is and try to optimize LR the SLOWNESS and LAG issues will be there until Adobe decides to update the issue with their next realease (4.2 or 3 or 4). You get what you pay for, $150 or $99 for a powerfull program like LR will always have issues. My copy of Photoshop CS5 $799 performs so much faster that I can't keep up sometimes.

You seem to be aware of the current things to do with 4.1 to reduce processing issues. If you are having the problems you say, I suspect other issues in your system. What config and setup do you have?

I've got the same setup LR3 worked with - 4GB w/ 2ghz core2duo & win7x64. Certainly not bleeding edge, but it used to work even with my 800mb 40k pictures catalog. LR4.1 certainly works better than RC2, but it's still useful to restart LR when the lags start appearing after working about 1h+ and rendering a lot of pictures - and a software that needs a restart to work like after 10min is simply buggy. But apart from that, maybe LR4 will never be as fast as LR3 because of the added functionality or because PV2012 is slower to render than PV2010 and/or I'll have to split my catalog into multiple smaller ones.

I purchased a new I7 quad core, 3.6GHZ, and loaded 32 GB Crucial Ram. I have 3 HD's, first is a 560 GB SSD to run programs, 2nd 1TB to hold all cache and catalogs, 3rd 2TB to finalize my photos and storage. Even with this set-up and when running LR 4.1 it still lags A LOT......... I think no matter how fast your PC is and try to optimize LR the SLOWNESS and LAG issues will be there until Adobe decides to update the issue with their next realease (4.2 or 3 or 4). You get what you pay for, $150 or $99 for a powerfull program like LR will always have issues. My copy of Photoshop CS5 $799 performs so much faster that I can't keep up sometimes.

My 2 cents!!

I suggest you try putting the RAW Cache and Cat. on the SSD.

BTW for LR, anything more than 8GB is currently overkill, unless you need it for other programs....which may effect your LR performance if resident...depends...

You seem to be aware of the current things to do with 4.1 to reduce processing issues. If you are having the problems you say, I suspect other issues in your system. What config and setup do you have?

I've got the same setup LR3 worked with - 4GB w/ 2ghz core2duo & win7x64. Certainly not bleeding edge, but it used to work even with my 800mb 40k pictures catalog. LR4.1 certainly works better than RC2, but it's still useful to restart LR when the lags start appearing after working about 1h+ and rendering a lot of pictures - and a software that needs a restart to work like after 10min is simply buggy. But apart from that, maybe LR4 will never be as fast as LR3 because of the added functionality or because PV2012 is slower to render than PV2010 and/or I'll have to split my catalog into multiple smaller ones.

You get what you pay for, $150 or $99 for a powerfull program like LR will always have issues.

Maybe that's Adobe's way of saying: Apple forced us to lower LR's price, and now see what you've got :-)

Ya know....I started on a 4KB PC with a floppy disk...it worked well...and was FAST. It was a bit deal when we got a 5MB HD.

What you need to understand is that time changes and, as we want more function, the processing needs and size of programs (and OSs) change...i.e. get bigger and need more power.

I suggest that your processor and memory need to increase. Adobe said that LR4 would run on it, but...

I would fault them on not describing what was truly needed to get good response time....but I will bet that they were not even sure until the final tuning was done....and I suspect it is not really final, as they got most of the big problems, but will continue to look at ways to tune it.

Pricing is a financial decision...NOT a development decision. There is not a developer out there who doesn't want to create the best, fastest, most capable program they can....but there are trade offs. I am glad that

Adobe made the decision to add function to LR. I would not give up the 2012 processing...it is a major step forward. A few upgrades are well worth it.

I purchased a new I7 quad core, 3.6GHZ, and loaded 32 GB Crucial Ram. I have 3 HD's, first is a 560 GB SSD to run programs, 2nd 1TB to hold all cache and catalogs, 3rd 2TB to finalize my photos and storage. Even with this set-up and when running LR 4.1 it still lags A LOT......... I think no matter how fast your PC is and try to optimize LR the SLOWNESS and LAG issues will be there until Adobe decides to update the issue with their next realease (4.2 or 3 or 4). You get what you pay for, $150 or $99 for a powerfull program like LR will always have issues. My copy of Photoshop CS5 $799 performs so much faster that I can't keep up sometimes.

My 2 cents!!

I suggest you try putting the RAW Cache and Cat. on the SSD.

BTW for LR, anything more than 8GB is currently overkill, unless you need it for other programs....which may effect your LR performance if resident...depends...

I had that set-up on my i5 before this machine and was running LR3.6 same issue. Actually, I have a program that monitors RAM called ballisticks utility, I have seen LR consume around 12+GB of RAM when processing. Plus I have CS5 master collection and having PS, DW, and LR open I need the RAM power.

What you need to understand is that time changes and, as we want more function, the processing needs and size of programs (and OSs) change...i.e. get bigger and need more power.bI suggest that your processor and memory need to increase. Adobe said that LR4 would run on it, but...

Adobe made the decision to add function to LR. I would not give up the 2012 processing...it is a major step forward. A few upgrades are well worth it.

I like PV2012, too, that's why I'm using LR4, though it lost some flexibility over PV2010. And I'm aware of the fact that that more features need more computing power - with Word 6.0 you could type a letter w/ 256kb RAM, with Office 2010 you need 4GB to type the same letter, but with a much prettier interface :-p ... no, really, actually I worked as a C++ programmer for some time and looked into .NET, too.

The problem is that it's tempting to cut dev time by using more memory/cpu resources and not optimizing a program, and rigorous in-house testing is a major dev cost so why not let the user do it? And you'll see, LR4.2 and LR4.3 will improve further, even if it's based on lua and some features were added - an issue like slowdown the longer a program runs is simply sloppy programming imho. And there are major bugs left, e.g. for me copy/pasting dev settings always only applies to a part of the selected pictures and I have to do it multiple times.

That being said LR is pretty good at what it's doing, handling such a lot of pictures at this speed at all is more than I'd imagined was possible before I used LR.